Publié : 20/Oct/2016
Source: CRAI blog

By Lucy Hovil

Drawing on seven years of research by IRRI, my book, Refugees, Conflict and the Search for Belonging has just been published (Palgrave Macmillan, September 2016). Although the focus is on East and Central Africa, the book has application beyond the region, pointing to drivers and failures that continue to feed the global refugee crisis.

The book argues that issues of inclusion and exclusion animate and sustain cycles of violence, and that the likelihood of conflict increases when collective identities are mobilised, politicised and “hardened” by conflict entrepreneurs. By the same logic, expanding spaces for belonging helps create the conditions for sustainable peace. These spaces are ones in which multiple identities can exist; in which identities are seen as fluid and changeable; and in which systems for marking out “difference” are carefully crafted so as to not create these hardened boundaries of insiders and outsiders. It argues that citizenship and belonging are both a cause, and part of a possible resolution, to ongoing conflict and displacement in the region.

Based on 1,115 interviews carried out between 2008 and 2014 with refugees, internally displaced groups and returnees in seven countries of the Great Lakes region as part of a research project overseen by the International Refugee Rights Initiative, I argue that the reality of exile provides a litmus test for understanding these dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Causes of exile, failures to belong in exile, and the illusive nature of “durable solutions” all conspire to create exclusion and to leave those who have been uprooted from their homes on the margins of societies. Shortcomings in refugee policy, which often maintain marginalisation as the default position for those who have been exiled from their state, then collude with the logic of exclusion that is at work in formal, legal mechanisms of citizenship in these postcolonial states.

The book holds in tension the fact that, on the one hand, spaces for refugee protection are continually shrinking and the label, refugee, is a crucial tool for targeting and maintaining protection of the rights of a specific legal category of people both during exile and at the point of return. On the other, realities on the ground demonstrate that refugees have multiple identities, deploy multiple coping strategies, and often defy neat categories.

I do not claim that one or the other is right, but argue that both narratives need to listen to and interact with each other. The book maintains a clear engagement with legal categories through an emphasis on policy and the extent to which I uphold the use of categorisation; but also demonstrates the inadequacies of an overreliance on these categories, and shows the need for far greater nuance and flexibility in adapting to specific contexts. The findings reveal the multiple ways in which refugees forge spaces for belonging in ways that often contradict – or even subvert – national and international policies, and point to the somewhat obvious fact that policy needs to be bottom up, rather than top-down, something that has long been recognised by practitioners and academics alike but has yet to infuse much programming on the ground.

The findings, therefore, point to the tenuous nature of state-bounded citizenship that has failed to accommodate the reality that notions of inclusion and exclusion function in multiple ways that go beyond – or even discard – national citizenship. At the same time, they also demonstrate that whether for those living on the margins within their own state, or refugees pushed to the edges of a polity in exile, citizenship retains strong symbolic – as well as, at times, real – value. Both the possibility of citizenship and its continual failure to deliver beat at the heart of the book.

Thus, refugees continue to challenge the parameters of citizenship and belonging, and to test our political imaginations. But, as the book concludes, it should never be this hard for those uprooted from their homes to find spaces in which to belong. Instead, in order for responses to be anything more than palliative, policies need to be rooted in understandings of identity and belonging that are more supple; that pull people into the centre rather than polarise and exclude; and that draw on, rather than negate, the creativity that refugees themselves demonstrate in their quest to forge spaces of belonging.